Jacob Elordi Calls ‘Frankenstein’s 10-Hour Makeup Process “Liberating”

As Guillermo del Toro‘s Frankenstein comes to life on the big screen, Jacob Elordi recalled the seemingly intense process for becoming the Creature.

On the red carpet at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, the actor explained to Deadline why the makeup process was “incredibly liberating” for his character work, despite spending nearly half of each day getting into the prosthetics and makeup.

“It was 10 hours to kind of relinquish myself and become this thing that’s other, which was a great relief, really,” said Elordi of Mike Hill, the film’s head of prosthetic makeup effects.

Hill—who previously worked with Del Toro on The Shape of Water (2017), Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019), Nightmare Alley (2021) and The Last Voyage of the Detemer (2023)—noted he “had to avoid” repeating the previous movie versions of Frankenstein’s monster, without letting those iconic depictions “stifle” their creation.

“It was very tricky, originally, and very daunting coming up with a new design for Frankenstein’s creature, but we weren’t looking at movies, we were looking at the literary versions of this creature,” he said. “And on best of that, Guillermo’s version of the literary version.”

As AI’s grasp on Hollywood continues to tighten, Hill noted that the Creature “has to stay grounded” in reality in order to appeal to his more human side.

“The Creature’s so grounded. You have to make the Creature real,” he explained. “If you make him too fantastic, then it goes out of the movie. So, the fantastic side of him is that we know he’s been patched together from the dead and brought back to life. We know he’s stitched up in areas and pieced together; that speaks for itself. So, you don’t need any glitz and glamour or CGI to help that along. It has to stay grounded.”

Hill continued, “So much as, the reason we did his hair brown and not black. It’s just so obvious to do a character with jet black hair, so we wanted him a little bit more Earthen, more than you felt that he wasn’t anything alien, he was one of us.”

Following its Venice Film Festival premiere back in August, Frankenstein debuts Oct. 17 in select theaters before it’s available to stream Nov. 7 on Netflix.